Durmitor, and the canyon that out-deepens most of Europe

The Tara River has spent roughly the last two million years cutting through the limestone of northern Montenegro, and the result, the Tara Canyon, is commonly cited as the deepest canyon in Europe and second only to the Grand Canyon in the United States among such comparisons worldwide, reaching depths of well over a thousand metres in its most dramatic stretches. The river itself, remarkably, stays clean enough along much of its length to be used for drinking without treatment in places, a rarity for a river of any size in Europe and a point of considerable local pride, protected in part by the canyon's own remoteness and in part by deliberate conservation.

The canyon forms the eastern boundary of Durmitor National Park, a limestone and dolomite massif that rises to over two and a half thousand metres at its highest point, Bobotov Kuk, and holds within its folds eighteen glacial lakes, locally called "gorske oči", mountain eyes, formed by glaciers that retreated from the range around ten thousand years ago and left basins that filled with meltwater and rain. The largest and most visited, Black Lake, sits a short, well-marked walk from the park's main entrance near the town of Žabljak, Montenegro's highest town and the obvious base for exploring the whole area.

A national park built around forty-eight named peaks

Durmitor's forty-eight peaks above two thousand metres give the park a genuinely alpine character rarely associated with the Balkans by visitors who know the region only from its coastline. Trails range from gentle walks around Black Lake suitable for most visitors to serious multi-day routes across the high plateau and up onto the ridges themselves, and the park's designation as a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1980 recognised both the glacial landscape and the deep, largely intact forest covering its lower slopes, home to brown bears, wolves and a range of birds of prey that find considerably less disturbed habitat here than in most of the rest of the continent.

Getting there, and why so few people bother

Part of what has kept Durmitor relatively unvisited by international standards is straightforward geography: it sits well inland, reached by mountain roads that switch back for hours from either the coast or the Serbian and Bosnian borders, and it has none of the coastal infrastructure that draws the bulk of Montenegro's visitors to Kotor and Budva. That relative inaccessibility is, from a walker's point of view, most of the appeal. The trails around Black Lake can be busy in high summer, but venture further into the massif, onto the plateau between the peaks or down towards the canyon rim itself, and the crowds thin to almost nothing.

Žabljak itself, at around 1,450 metres, doubles as a modest winter sports base when the snow settles, a reminder that Durmitor's appeal is not strictly seasonal even if the walking routes are; but it is the long days of summer, when the high plateau is at its most accessible and the wildflowers are out across the pastures below the peaks, that suit a walking holiday best. Shepherds still bring livestock up to these summer pastures much as they have for generations, one of the few places left in Europe where transhumance, the seasonal movement of grazing animals between lowland and highland pasture, remains a working practice rather than a preserved tradition.

June through September gives the most reliable walking conditions, with the higher routes generally clear of snow only from June and mountain weather, changeable at the best of times, at its most settled in July and August despite the coastal heat those same months bring to the rest of the country.

The canyon itself is generally seen rather than walked, from a handful of viewpoints along its rim and from the Đurđevića Tara Bridge, a concrete arch completed in 1940 that carries the main road across the gorge at a height of around 170 metres and remains, decades on, one of the more striking pieces of infrastructure in the Balkans purely for the scale of the drop beneath it. Rafting trips run along a stretch of the river below, a considerably more immersive way to appreciate the canyon's depth than any road-level view can quite manage, weather and water levels permitting.